I wanted to use a Boot floppy to boot DSL Ver 4.4.10 from my USB Flashdrive on my old Compaq Presario 1672. The previous floppy USB bootimage wouldn't work for me with ver 4.4.10, and my BIOS did not allowbooting from USB.

I used UNETBOOTIN (with Win2k) to copy the DSL 4.4.10 ISO to myUSB Flash Drive.

The Knoppix CD consists of a number of files, of which only one reallymattered to what I needed: the "miniroot". To be exact, the miniroot isa compressed bootable image within the Knoppix image - it is, in fact,the part that makes the Knoppix CD bootable - so tweaking the filesinside it consisted of the following steps:

1. Mount the Knoppix image 2. Decompress the miniroot into a temporary file 3. Mount the miniroot 4. Modify the files in it 5. Recompress it 6. Create a loop-mounted file 7. Copy the miniroot into it 8. Make it bootable 9. Write it to a floppy

Boot script follows:

Code Sample

#!/bin/bash# Created by Ben Okopnik on Thu Mar 17 23:56:31 EST 2005## Many thanks to Fabian Franz, whose original script gave me the idea of# how it's all supposed to work.## This script creates a boot floppy that passes control to a USB PenDrive# containing a Knoppix CD image. No CDROM, no problem!## SYSLINUX & PERL must be installed.# (I used Ubuntu 8.04.3 to execute this script, then copied the boot.img# file to a Flash Drive, then used DSL to create the Floppy.)#

# Copy the USB-related modules from the old miniroot to the new onemkdir -p miniroot/modules/scsifor n in `ls old_miniroot/modules/scsi|egrep 'usb|hci'`do cp old_miniroot/modules/scsi/"$n" miniroot/modules/scsidone

# Copy everything except the "scsi" dir from the old miniroot to the new# onerm -rf old_miniroot/modules/scsicp -af old_miniroot/* miniroot/